From the end of the Civil War, writers and critics have both championed and questioned the aptness of realist literary aesthetics for representing the lived reality and political aspirations of black Americans. In writing their works, black writers contended simultaneously with the conventions of blackface minstrelsy and the views of major realist critics like John William De Forest and William Dean Howells, who tended to locate black authenticity in uneducated, dialect-speaking characters. In response some black writers resorted to idealized and genteel modes to assert the reality of sophisticated black characters. Did black linguistic difference and cultural difference limit or enable writers’ expression of literary complexity? From Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the late nineteenth century, to James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison in the middle decades of the twentieth, and through Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., at the end of the century, black writers and scholars, like their white counterparts, have explored the literary possibilities of vernacular speech and struggled to connect everyday reality to high literary style.